I had an Akai S900 in 98. Got an S2000 soon after. I think the S900 had about 12 seconds of mono sampling. The S2000 had much more, must have been a few minutes. Dope shit man. My boy got the S3000 above. I used my S2000 until about 2007.

Yep.
What you do is hook it up to a sequencing program, like Cubase (what I rocked. Holy fuck is that even around anymore??!), anyhow Logic, Cubase etc running on your Mac. You have a MIDI translator that plugged into your computer. It allowed a MIDI trigger (keyboard generally) to fire into the computer, and record or play a note. It also allowed MIDI signals to fire out of the computer, from the sequencing program, into the sampler. When this happened a sound was triggered in the sampler.

i have a s900 that i use from time to time. tbh, these vintage machines are what give you a particular sound and they cannot be replicated on a DAW, imo. i have midi modules that i also have the software synth version and its no comparison there either. one middle C blows away the "100% realistic analog synth sound"

to each his own. if you have a laptop and some dope earbuds to make music, Do That Shit!. but, if you want to define your style/sound you might wanna buy some hardware/gear.

the time length is in relation to the samplerate and, when recording/sampling, that is broken up into choices of 3,000hz 6,000hz 12,000hz ,.. all the way up to 40,000hz. then those samples are loaded from what you record or from the disk to the system RAM. the RAM on the s900 holds all the samples to play at a given time and that is 750kb. you can have other samples on the floppy disk, but the RAM can only load up to 750kb. those lower samplerates can record/play for longer than the full quality @ 11 seconds but suffer from further degradation. this can be good and bad

my s900 is finicky and double taps random samples and doesnt like certain pitching. but, for sampling a bunch of drums on a disk to give em some grit, it is noice. the s900, as legend is told, is the same 12 bit "magic" used for the mpc3000/mpc60

as far as why i got an s900?? ive always wanted a classic mpc since i heard entroducing,. straight up!

It definitely had a warmer sound than the S2000. I only used it for about a year, but I made a lot of heat on it. It was so big and cumbersome. Amazing to think where we are at now.

I remember I had a huge mixing board too, now, all of that, plus a full blown studio sits in my iMac, basically an incredibly thin TV compared to what existed then. Wow. What a paradigm shift. Cool I was part of it.

In the shots (pics) for The Main Ingredient, Pete Rock and CL Smooth, there is an S900. Biggie recorded down there. Q Tip, hung down there etc. it was a popular device. Despite its limitations compared to today's standards.

Ooo the E6400, used heavily in drum n bass, think it still used by the guy that made this, dillinja under the alias of Capone

There would be no bass in dubstep if it wasn't for how he got that machine to work for him, and what he did to kick drums and 808's, Dillinja also made his own valve sound system, basically because no sound system can take what he makes, he is the master of raw. I still want one, like mellow said it's being selective about hardware, only so far you can go with software, good example is tape emulation, all of them miss something, it's the same thing, it will not sound like hardware. these aren't irrelevent, goldmines of sound.